


Holy Form

by Nonsuch



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Abrasax creepiness, Bureaucracy, Nightmare Bureaucracy, The Abrasax master plan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 15:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5503184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nonsuch/pseuds/Nonsuch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gideon doesn't have to endure the tedium of the Earth monitoring office for long before he comes across an ID form of singular significance. A form that could, quite possibly, change everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holy Form

Gideon lasted for ten minutes, rocking back and forth idly on the swivel chair assigned to him, before he could no longer bear the silence. “What are you doing?”

Karina, a leathered woman with vivid purple skin, weed-green hair and white-rimmed glasses, didn’t shift her gaze from the holo monitor. The only sound was of clicking keys.

“You can’t pretend I’m not here – it’s just the two of us. I’m never going to learn if you don’t tell me anything.”

Karina exhaled slowly, and turned to regard Gideon. He had started in his trainee post as the Abrasax Industries representative to the Earth monitoring office the day prior, the position granted by Kalique Abrasax as a favour to his house.

Gideon’s first day had been occupied by Karina’s sermons on the exquisite beauty of the ID form, the sacredness of the geneprint database, and the hallowed purity of the Grand Overseer’s signature. By the second hour of explanation, Gideon had begun mentally cursing his father and wondering what crime could possibly warrant such a cruel and tedious punishment.       

“I’m doing work.” Karina enunciated ‘work’ in a way that strongly suggested she was of the view that Gideon had no concept of what work was.

“Well, where’s my work? I have to do something to pass the time.”

Karina gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, clearly offended. She inclined her head in the direction of the vast towers of papers leant against the far wall. “You can digitise the signed gene profiles.”

Gideon frowned, genuinely baffled. “But I thought they originated on the database. What possible reason could there be to digitise them?”

Karina turned to stare at him. “Did you not listen yesterday? Those paper forms are signed by the Grand Overseer himself! Without his signature, they had might as well not exist.” Returning her attention to the monitor, she finished on an instruction. “You need the machine to your left.”

Gideon turned to regard the vast, slanting piles of form **s** leaning against the walls. Each tower formed a gradient, with the fresh white forms at the top gradually turning yellow, and then brown. What had evidently once been a tiled floor was covered in the fine, powdery remains of the forms that hadn’t made it.

As much as he longed for the good company and fine beverages of The Roving Legionnaire, his favourite Orousian watering hole, Gideon knew his father was close to losing patience with him. Since his jumper and leisure habits were funded entirely by his father, and were thus conditional on his approval, Gideon had no choice but to accept the deflating reality that involved him scanning mouldering forms on terrsie recurrences _ad infinitum_. He could only hope his period of penance ended before infinity did. 

Gideon reluctantly set to work, starting with the freshest pile. He made a great show of sighing and muttering complaints, and felt deflated when he looked up to find that Karina had inserted ear pods and was entirely deaf to him. Robbed of even the most meagre companionship, Gideon focused on the forms he had been tasked with digitising.

A form, Karina had explained on his first day, was a sacred object – if a person’s existence, progress through the eons, and wishes were not committed to ink and paper, they were immaterial. Their existence could not be proved without paperwork, and could not be validated without a signature. Gideon, who had previously only realised paper existed because his tutor had once mentioned a curious phenomenon known as handwriting to him, had attempted to be polite while his mind screamed out against the baffling illogic of it all.

As Gideon scanned form after form on the digitiser, he found there to be little sacred or remarkable about them. They gave the most mundane details of the matches imaginable – their name, age, and the location and nature of the identification event. On a separate part of the form was the identification of their genetic match, which was confirmed by the Grand Overseer’s signature. The Grand Overseer’s portrait, the only object in the office not covered in a layer of dust, on account of Karina’s habit of polishing it each morning, showed a gaunt, withered man with violently jutting eyebrows and a lazy eye. He had been in his post for several millennia, and was notoriously reclusive. Forms were posted through the letterbox in his office door each evening, and were found pushed back through, a scribbled signature and stamped date on every one, each morning.

Gideon idly wondered why the Grand Overseer’s signature was necessary, and what it achieved. It was a simple scrawl in black ink, and Gideon could see no utility or purpose for it. In fact, he could see no utility or purpose to the office where he had been tasked to work. The terrsies were recurrences, certainly, but their genetics seemed deeply perfunctory. They were the recurrences of bank managers, petty officials and courtiers who had been dead for millennia. Any inheritance they may have once been entitled to had long since been eroded by interim heirs, and their existence represented nothing more than a curious novelty.

Out of sheer boredom Gideon took to noting particularly unusual or amusing names. Terrsie names were aggressively plebeian, with the same names recurring repeatedly: in the space of 30 forms, Gideon counted three Mohammeds, four Sarahs, and five Davids. He could only suppose that terrsie parents suffered from extreme poverty of imagination.

The unusual names, then, were positively refreshing. He smiled when he saw that a 30-year-old woman named Crystal Lark was the recurrence of a decorated Aegis officer who had died two million years prior. He snorted when he realised that an Orousian diplomat named Paladin Joyanta had recurred as a six-year-old child named Freddie Cocksac. He was still highly amused when he reached for the form bearing the name of Katherine Dunlevy, a young woman who’d given a blood sample to a fertility clinic located in a city known as Chicago. His smile vanished the moment he glanced down and realised who she was the recurrence of.

Katherine Dunlevy was the recurrence of Seraphi Abrasax.

One of Gideon’s earliest memories was of being taken to collective worship at the shrine of Seraphi Abrasax in the central arena of the outermost ring of Orous. Gideon and his parents sat on the front row, mere feet from the stage. In a stern whisper intended to subdue him, his mother told him that the ceremony marked the third centenary of her death. Seven-year-old Gideon, however, had little respect for the memory of a dead woman he’d never met. His squirming only stopped when the figures of Seraphi Abrasax’s children proceeded, wraith-like, up the central aisle, settling themselves onto the three thrones that had been waiting for them. From that moment on, his gaze was fixed on Kalique Abrasax. Gideon had known her from his earliest infancy; she was forever contriving reasons to steal him from his mother so she could pet him with her luxurious, sweeping fingers and whisper secrets in his ears. She seemed _wrong_ here, sat between her two brothers, her face as smooth and still as the marble seat beneath him and her body swamped by reams of black lace. Gideon had never known her face without a smile upon it, had never seen her wear anything but bright colours. The sight of her here, in black, troubled him, making his insides writhe. Her brothers were equally impenetrable, the only betrayal of emotion Balem Abrasax’s knuckle-whitening grip on the sinuous golden arm of his throne.

Gideon had stared at Kalique throughout the ceremony, far more fascinated by her face than the droning words of the priest. The ceremony ended with a collective prayer, an expression of hope for the emergence of Seraphi Abrasax’s recurrence. Her children mouthed the words along with the thousands gathered to pay homage, and Gideon would never forget the shining glint of hope that had lit Kalique’s eyes as she’d cast her eyes to the stars.

And now he held the fulfilment of that hope in his hands. He stared at the form stupidly for a few moments, his lips parted without forming any of the many, many questions rearing up in his mind.

Seraphi Abrasax was a goddess. A pioneer of the most common and efficient harvesting technologies, she was the woman responsible for RegeneX, the most popular and affordable strain of nectar. She was worshipped by countless peoples on innumerable planets, with filthy peasants and perfumed queens alike chanting her name – or what they understood to be her name – in their prayers. Her recurrence a mere four hundred years after her death was nothing short of miraculous. It would send shock waves through the civilised ’verse. It would change everything.

Gideon glanced over at Karina, whose fingers continued to tap out a steady rhythm on the keys. She chewed idly on nothing in particular, nodding her head slightly in time to the music channelled through her ear pods. He looked back at the form, and made his choice.

.

.

.

When he contacted Kalique Abrasax after making his excuses to Karina’s unhearing ears and departing from the office well before he should have, Gideon said nothing about what he had folded in the pocket of his jacket. He could not contact Kalique directly via FTL, instead asking her assistant to convey his regards and make enquiries as to the possibility of his being admitted for an audience. The reply was swift and emphatic: he was to visit her alcazar on Cerise without delay.

Kalique Abrasax was known for three things: her vast gardens, her easy manner, and her devotion to beauty. Gideon’s parents had risen from the obscure ranks of the bureaucratic class purely on account of their faces. His father, with his rich dark skin and strong, unyielding features, was uniquely handsome; his mother, with her green eyes and blonde hair, was his equal in beauty. Formal encounters dictated by protocols and schedules had given way to a relationship characterised by easy familiarity, and the family’s rise was an infamous and dependable font of cruel jokes and gossip. Gideon himself had no memory of the key-battering ignominy his parents had emerged from, with his earliest memories being thick with silks, perfumes and twelve-course meals.

Gideon represented the confluence of two distinct embodiments of aesthetic perfection, and had been blessed with his father’s tan skin and his mother’s dazzling green eyes. He’d grown up amongst Kalique’s household, and had held her hand as she’d led her favourites – men, women, children, all united by their beauty – through the paradise she’d created on Cerise. Each tour had yielded fresh wonders: flowers with stalks taller than he was, rambling hedges that had been allowed to take hold of an ancient, crumbled castle plucked from a harvest world, silver grass that was sweet to taste. His heart swelled from sensation at the scent that filled his nostrils when the door of the jumper cracked open.

His mind was a swirl of memories and hopes by the time he was shown into the private wing of Kalique Abrasax. He waited to be called from the antechamber he had been shown to, tapping his foot in a fierce rhythm against the floor. The tea he’d been served was heavily laden with sugar, just as he’d liked it as a child. He sipped on it periodically for comfort, heedless of the sensation of his teeth rotting.

Gideon was reaching for the form in his pocket to reassure himself that it was there when the doors to the main chamber swung open. Though no one called to him, the invitation was implicit. Gideon rose and entered the room.

Since he’d become a man grown, he’d seen little of Kalique. While his parents had urged him to accept her frequent invitations to parties and soirées (“for your own, good, Gideon. Have you forgotten what she did for us? For our house? Without Kalique Abrasax, we would have _no_ house!”), he had considered himself far too urbane and sophisticated to wilfully attend any public event where his parents would be present **.** He had instead preferred to choose his own circle, surrounding himself with wits and sycophants, and his energies had been occupied by the idle pleasures common amongst the sons of the wealthy houses. But now that he’d frittered away the best part of a century on brothels, bars and splice pits, he found he felt an ache for the pure pleasures of his childhood. And those pleasures could not be better personified than by the figure stood before him, her arms outstretched and her face radiant with delight.

Kalique Abrasax had allowed herself to grow old, but she wore her wrinkles as if they were a fashion. The creases and lines on her face only made her seem more distinguished, each one seemingly testifying to some unspoken but undeniable accomplishment. Her smile remained every bit as dazzling as he remembered.

“Gideon! How you have changed. Come here to me.”

Gideon swallowed slowly, heart pounding from some strange mix of dread and anticipation. He bowed stiffly, recalling how he had habitually greeted her as a child, only for a finger to meet his chin and lift his face to look at her. She canted her head, her eyes glittering with wry amusement. “You’re no longer seven. Come. We will sit together as equals. It has been too long since you were last here. I hope you still enjoy sweets. I had the kitchen make your favourites.”

She gestured to a bowl piled with an assortment of colourful, sugary concoctions as she led him to a richly upholstered sofa, and his stomach rumbled in nostalgic approval.

They sat together for hours, Kalique’s questions incessant and calculated to keep him talking. She held his hand in hers, stroking her finger across his knuckles as he spoke. She was an exceptionally skilful conversationalist, and it was only when she paused to demand more tea from the servitant attending to them that Gideon realised Kalique had said almost nothing about herself. Instead, she had sucked information from him, vampire-like – he had no idea why and could not fathom the utility of intelligence on his habits and vices. He only knew that he liked being fed upon.

The lull in their conversation was a long time coming, but Gideon seized upon it eagerly when it came, reaching for the form in his pocket. Any trepidation he had felt upon entering the room had long since been vanquished, all his nerves soothed by the inherent comfort of Kalique’s company.

“I am honoured to have the pleasure of your company again, but I must confess that I came here on a mission.”

“A mission? How grand. You must tell me more.”

Gideon withdrew the form carefully, passing it to Kalique. “I feel indebted to you for all your kindness, Lady, and I knew that you would want to see this.”

Kalique smiled faintly to cloak her surprise, carefully unfolding the paper and scanning its contents. The smile slipped from her mouth within moments. Her eyes were cast over the form two, three, four times before they were raised to look at Gideon.

“Where did you get this?”

“The monitoring office. I was tasked with digitising the geneprint forms. Does it mean what I think it does?”

Kalique looked back at the form, nodding carefully and stroking her thumb tenderly across the ink. “Yes. If it is printed and signed, it is indisputable. Mother has returned. It feels that so little time has passed.” Kalique smiled wistfully, caught up in old memories and older longings **.** “I shouldn’t be surprised. She had an indomitable spirit. She will have had no patience for death.”

“I am happy for you. As soon as I saw the name, I realised what this would mean – to you, to everyone.”

Kalique turned with alarming swiftness, her eyes locking with Gideon’s. “Have you spoken of this?”

“No. No one else knows. The woman in the office is far too wedded to process to notice anything not submitted via the proper channels. If you wish, this form can simply be made to vanish. The recurrence could be brought straight to you.”

Kalique, her expression pensive, extended a hand to Gideon’s cheek, brushing it gently with her knuckles. “The bureaucracy exists for a reason. This form is precious – it marks the first stage of my mother’s resurrection, and its sanctity cannot be compromised.”

Gideon frowned. “But your brothers–”

“Must know. She is their mother as much as she is mine, and they will be _so_ very happy to learn that she has returned to us. I cannot deny them their reunions.”

Gideon was uncertain of the truth of this, despite Kalique’s manner of absolute, shining sincerity. Rumours and gossip about the House of Abrasax were rife, the stories concerning Seraphi Abrasax’s downfall ripe with perversity, jealousy and mystery. Balem Abrasax had only begun to regain his foothold in the RegeneX market in the last century, throwing himself into the pursuit of profit after centuries of silent mourning. Titus Abrasax, by contrast, had been positively indiscreet, seemingly more concerned with wallowing in the new pleasures opened up by the release of his inheritance than honouring the memory of the dead.

“Then what would you have me do?”

Kalique pressed the form back in Gideon’s hands, her touch warm. “Take it back with you, and do with it exactly what you were instructed to. The alert will be triggered and my brother informed as the owner of the planet. From there, we can ensure the recurrence is lifted and restored to her proper position.”

Gideon nodded silently, confused and strangely deflated. Those tears at the ceremony, the hope shining within them, had been an element of performance, perhaps sourced from the heart but easily leashed. He saw none of the bone-deep sorrow he’d witnessed as a child now, only measured wistfulness. He wondered if Kalique had perhaps always intended him for this, perceived him as a tool from those first days when she’d held him on her lap and stroked her fingers through his hair. But her smile was too sweet, her touch too soft, for such doubts to trouble him for long.

“You are a dear, kind boy to think of me. I am grateful for your loyalty. Trust that it will not be forgotten.” She sighed sorrowfully, casting a glance at the flower-wrapped clock hanging above the fireplace, “I would not wish to keep you further. Process is all, and time is precious – you must ensure that everything is as it should be. Can I trust you to ensure the recurrence is registered?”

“You can always trust me.” Kalique leaned across the sofa, and pressed a kiss upon his cheek. 

With his cheek still tender and the scent of flowers still lingering on his skin, Gideon returned to his office, feeling strangely bereft despite what he carried with him in his pocket. Karina fixed him with a look of mute judgement upon his entry, but said nothing when he swiftly proceeded to his station. The form was duly digitised, and Gideon turned to watch Karina as the regular drum of her fingers on the keys ceased. Her eyes were bugged, and her mouth was hanging open. She turned to him slowly, plucking the buds from her ears and blinking with excruciating slowness. “Did you just scan a form for the recurrence of _Seraphi Abrasax_?”

“Yes, I did. Is there a problem?”

Karina shook her head dumbly, in the manner of a woman who had been plunged into a serious crisis of faith. Gideon watched her worry her bottom lip as she cross-referenced the date of the identification event with the date of the signature, noting the precious weeks that had passed, and grinned. Watching her faith in the sacred church of bureaucracy crumble was far more satisfying than it should have been.

Gideon cheerfully returned to his task, his thoughts lingering on a certain kiss and its promise.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This story, written for the first Jupiter Ascending Secret Santa, is for whatistigerbalm - Merry Christmas and I really hope you enjoy this nightmare dive into bureaucracy!
> 
> As always, kudos/comments are welcome :).


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